Censorship Explorer

Check whether a URL is censored in a particular country by using proxies located around the world.

Instructions

Input URLs or text into the top box and choose whether you want to request those URLs via your own browser or through one or more proxies.

Each URL inputted will be requested through each selected proxy. Additionally each URL will be requested from our own server in the Netherlands so that a comparison can be made.

The proxy list is regularly updated by scraping free online proxy lists such as freeproxylists.com and xroxy.com. Clicking the proxy will open a new tab for IP lookup service whatismyipaddress.com showing additional details about the proxy. If you cannot find a useful proxy you can specify your own in the bottom box (in the form IP:port, e.g. 192.168.0.22:80).

Although all listed proxies are publicly available on the web they might not all be made accessible intentionally. URL blocking is mostly intentional and web traffic from a proxy to a blocked site may have consequences for the owner of the proxy. Consider the political situation in the country of the proxy you are using w.r.t. the types of URLs you want to request through the proxy.

Sample project

The output is a table with the following columns:

the URL requested

Country of proxy: when you selected a proxy from the list, the country will be specified

Type of proxy: when you selected a proxy from the list, the type of proxy (transparent or anonymous) will be specified.

Proxy: the IP address of the proxy, including the port used on that proxy. Clicking the proxy will open a new tab for IP lookup service whatismyipaddress.com showing additional details about the proxy.

Request time: the time at wich the URL was retrieved through the proxy, in UTC+1.

Response time: the time it took for the proxy to return our requested URL (the lower the number, the faster the proxy).

20 s time out: whether the connection to the proxy timed out or not.

the response code of the URL fetched through the proxy, as returned in the HTTP headers

Response code in NL: the response code of the URL fetched through our own server, as returned in the HTTP headers

Response differs: whether the response codes as returned by the proxy and our own server differ

RST (proxy): whether the connection to the proxy was dropped by means of a reset package.

RST (NL): whether the connection from the Netherlands was dropped by means of a reset package.

redirects (proxy): the number of redirects the tool had to follow in order to get at the final URL

redirects (NL): the number of redirects for our connection from the Netherlands.

redirected to (proxy): the final URL retrieved through the proxy

redirected to (NL): the final URL retrieved from our connection from the Netherlands.

HTML differs: whether the HTML returned by the proxy and our own server differ. This comparison is might be useful for static pages.

Considerations for interpretation of the output:

Do not trust a proxy when it regularly returns response code '-' (something went wrong) or when the field '20 s time out' says 'yes'.

Other projects using this tool

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